At the moment, XM claims to have 4 million subscribers. SIRIUS has 1.4 million. According to a recent Forrester Research study, Satellite Radio will have 20 million listeners by 2010. In a recent survey of listenership in 87 markets, Clear Channel had 48 million and Infinity had 35 million.
What we don’t know is how many of Satellite Radio’s future 20 million will be skimmed off the top of current traditional listeners. Being conservative, if only half of them came from the other side, then you’d have 20 million Satellite listeners and 73 million listeners of AM/FM. That would mean between all radio listeners, 36% of them would listen to XM or SIRIUS.
36% sounds somewhat substantial to me – especially when you consider how that will affect the advertising pie for terrestrial Radio.
Just today, Media week is reporting, "Kagan Research forecasts...subscriptions for XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio to 46.8 million, with revenues of $7.6 billion, by 2014."
Podcasting: “It is Painful.”
Some might view Mays’ recent remark as a little defensive and even condescending.
Podcasting is all of a year or so old. It’s in its infancy. Yet, I haven’t seen any new communications technology in the last 10 years expand as quickly or get as much attention – in the public sector and within the Radio industry – (whether executives are willing to admit it or not). I just “googled” the word “Podcasting”. Hmmm…only 7,710,000 million hits.
I read yesterday there are over 6,000 podcasts out there. Who’s listening?
PewInternet.org reports:
More than 22 million American adults own iPods or MP3 players and 29% of them have downloaded podcasts from the Web so that they could listen to audio files at a time of their choosing. That amounts to more than 6 million adults who have tried this new feature that allows internet "broadcasts" to be downloaded onto their portable listening device. [April, 2005].
The Radio Industry didn’t take streaming very seriously at first. As a matter of fact, it downright ignored it for the most part. Now webcasting has grown to the point where the major online Internet webcasters are rated by Arbitron and MediaMetrix. A lesson was learned by that and Podcasting has earned quite the interest of many major broadcasters including, for one, Infinity Broadcasting
This past May, Infinity launched a radio station where the programming is comprised completely from contributed podcasts. It’s called KYOURADIO.com - "Open Source Radio". (Pronounced K You Radio .com). The company that is losing Howard Stern later this year is apparently looking for new gains in the exploding world of Podcasting.
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